On a New Kind of Anxiety

 On a New Kind of Anxiety

As technology advances, new forms of anxiety haunt my dreams.  For the first half of my life, I lived quite successfully without a cell-phone.  A long time ago, I knew a lawyer from a big city who was on-call with respect to managing propane fire explosions.  He carried a pager clipped to his belt. Of course, doctors with similar on-call responsibilities were also available by pager, as were drug dealers.  But instant access was not required of most professionals.  When I found myself obliged to carry and use a cell-phone, probably in the late nineties, the device was an annoyance and burden to me.  I used it as little as possible.  Of course, everything has now changed.  I don’t even have a “land-line” anymore and my number isn’t listed in any telephone directory.  When a windstorm tore down an enormous branch from a backyard tree, the jagged mass of leafy, forking timber knocked out an electrical cable.  I called the utilities and asked them to inspect the fallen wire.  They told me that it was a phone line and that, since I no longer used that service, the company wouldn’t bother to send someone out to retrieve the wire.  The utilities’ workers snipped the cable, rolled it up, and took it away with them.  

In my dream, I was driving in west Kansas, east-bound across empty plains rutted with dry washes.  My small children were with me, not really sentient and only incidental, an abstract notion intended to induce worry.  I drove the car into an arroyo where it’s wheels sunk into the sand.  Abandoning the car, I drove, nonetheless (how? And in what vehicle?) to a leafy village in central Kansas.  I stopped on the grounds of a historical site, a campus of buildings where settlers had once founded an “intentional community” – that is, an utopia.  The buildings looked like churches with towers and steeples. As I was touring the utopia, I discovered that I had left my cell-phone in the vehicle stranded in the dry gulch a couple hundred miles to the west. Feeling in my pockets for the missing phone, I felt a very sharp pang of regret and, even, fear – what would I do without my cell-phone?

To my relief, I saw my eldest son, Martin, strolling along the sidewalk.  He told me that he would take the children to a motel somewhere in Iowa.  My plan was to retrace my route west, find the stranded vehicle and, then, use my cell-phone to call my son so that I could meet him at the motel.  Martin didn’t tell me how far he intended to drive or where in Iowa he was going to stop; nor did he tell me the name of the motel where he planned to spend the night.  To reach Martin’s car, we crossed the yard of a nearby grain elevator and, then, encountered a steep ramp covered in wooden shingles that we ascended.  I was panting when I reached the top of the ramp.  

Martin departed with the kids.  I suddenly remembered that I didn’t have a vehicle.  It wasn’t clear how I had reached the village in which the utopia had once existed.  I thought that I would use my cell-phone app to locate my car.  But, then, I also remembered that I didn’t have the cell-phone and couldn’t use it for anything.  Grief sapped my strength – perhaps, I had never recovered from the steep ascent up the shingled ramp.  My sorrow was so great that I was unable to do anything.  I sat on a bench with tears in my eyes.  

Somehow, I found my way back to the stranded car. It was now twilight and purple shadows stretched out across the plains.  I freed the car from the sandy gulch without difficulty and turned it eastward in the direction of Iowa.  Night fell and I drove into the darkness.  My plan was to call Martin and ask him where he was staying.  But, when I reached into my pocket, the cell-phone was not there.  Now what was I going to do?  I thought that I could make a tour of Iowa, checking at all of the motels to see if Martin and the kids were there.  But how long would this take?  The cell-phone was like a phantom limb aching in my chest, over my heart.  

I opened my eyes.  The morning was half-lit, grey, with birds singing in the trees.  I rested for a few minutes considering how I should solve the problem of the missing cell-phone.  One solution after another offered themselves, but all were infeasible.  Only after a half-hour did it occur to me that the problem didn’t require a solution.  The problem had arisen in a dream and, in fact, my cell-phone with it’s charging cable was plugged into the wall downstairs.  

But the children were lost, never to be seen again.